Korg Kaossilator Pro Review

I love listening to music, I play the French Horn (I know, no one plays the French Horn), and I love messing with synthesizers. When I was bored I decided to go around YouTube watching people play with synthesizers. The two that really caught my eye were the monome and the Kaossilator Pro. The monome was quite amazing, but required a lot of time and had a big learning curve. The Kaossilator Pro, on the other hand, was simple to use intuitive and well designed, though not a well as the monome. It was also bit cheaper, that was the final factor that I looked at before buying it.

Construction

The Kaossilator comes in a lightweight casing that is very sturdy. The buttons are made of a rubber material that is sensitive enough to feel natural to most people. The Kaossilator is a very well constructed product and is hard to not to like.

Features

The Kaossilator is a bit more on the professional side, so the normal 3.5mm jack doesn’t work here (the one that goes into the iPod or Zune or your smartphone), so I would highly suggest buying a 3.5 mm to 6.3mm( A.K.A 1/4) adapter or some headphones that come with adapters. I however was not aware of this and was forced to plug it into my main home stereo with a line input.

The programs on the Kaossilator Pro come in many types; leads, acoustics, bass’, chords, special, drums, patterns, and vocoders (vocal encoders). In all there are 200 programs that are all have these variables; gate arpeggio, tempo, scale (like Dorian), note range (octaves), and key (key of F or key of Cb) . there is a lot more to go over, so here is a video you can watch.

The best feature that makes this the best synthesizer for its price is its loop banks. The first Kaossilator had one loop bank, the Pro has 4 loops, which makes it like 4 of the original Kaossilators in one device. These banks allow you to record 1,2,4,8, or 16 beats. When after recording the set amount of beats, you can even overdub it an infinite amount of times. This makes it useful when you want to make multiple tracks stick to one bank.

Price

$399 compared to the monome’s $500

Conclusion

The Kaossilator is a wonderful product and no one can say no to that, it simply is too good. I have been playing with since Sunday and have already had a ton of fun and only played with 20 programs. I still have a long way to go, but I have already found this product to be worth the $399 that I spent on it.